I'm not really bothered about Silverlight. It seems a bit confused as to what it is but (and everyone tells me this is wrong but it's the impression I'm left with every time I look into it) it seems to be a Flash competitor.

I don't think anything with displace Flash on the web for a long time. SVG was going to, then went nowhere (or became silverlight maybe).

Flash didn't succeed because of its technology and capabilities (it was shit) or it's code or syntax (they were shit), it succeeded because the editing environment offered an alternative valid paradigm - the way it tied drawn and coeded elements together. This is what I miss by far the most when I try any other sort of coding. The visual stuff and the coded stuff do not have the explicit and explorable relationships that Flash enforced.

So yeah, if I wanted to do the sorts of things Silverlight is doing I'd probably do them in flash rather than learn a whole new thing which nobody in the whole world has the plugin for (yeah I realise it can do desktop stuff too, and while that's interesting, I have no interest whatsoever in making desktop apps).

What I actually want to do is graphical stuff mainly in 3d. Anything 2d I want to do I can do in Flash but I've had the urge to do 3d stuff lately (explorable stuff). Flash can do 3d, probably to a standard I'd be happy with, but it's slow as fuck. But doing 3d any other way seems hugely overcomplicated. There doesn't seem to be a /good/ free 3d(+physics and sound and stuff all in the same place) engine. And with not knowing the languages they tend to use it's hard to choose between the non-good ones. So my plan is: get a grasp of a language (probably c#) and then pick a 3d engine and play with it.